Surrounded by barbed wire on a hilly stretch of Route 53 in Elmore County, the state's only all-women maximum security prison was a place where the inmates universally feared for their safety for nearly two decades, according to a U.S. Department of Justice report issued January.

As such, the abuse would have happened under Gladys Deese, who led the prison for four years before she retired in 2005.

The abuse would have also happened under Frank Albright, Deese's replacement, whose leadership was described in an earlier Department of Justice report as "fear-driven management."

And, the abuse would have happened under Albright's deputy warden at Tutwiler, Karla Jones, who was later promoted to lead Easterling Correctional Facility.

Now, Tutwiler is in the hands of Bobby Barrett, a veteran of 27 years in the prison system, who took over as warden from Albright in 2012.

Is his presence enough to make a difference? Possibly, according to David Wise, former St. Clair Correctional Facility warden who knows Barrett and praised him as hard-nosed and talented.

"If you're a strong warden and you pay attention to what's going on in your prison, can you stop it all?" Wise said. "No, you can't stop it all."

Much depends, he said, on how much respect that the guards have for the warden, how much faith that the warden has in his captains and lieutenants, and whether he keeps "his eyes and ears to the ground."

Gladys Deese

Gladys Deese doesn't remember much about her years at Tutwiler. At least that's what she said in a deposition she gave for a civil lawsuit that a Tutwiler inmate filed against the Alabama Department of Corrections and former Tutwiler guard David Sims.

"You have to realize when I left Tutwiler, I left my memory," Deese told an attorney in the January 2006 deposition, when asked about the case.

In a recent interview with AL.com, Deese said she hadn't read the Department of Justice's Tutwiler report and couldn't speculate whether Tutwiler's problems fell on the wardens.

"The wardens can't be everywhere all the time and you do the best you can with what you got," Deese said.

Deese took her first job in the ADOC as a correctional officer at Tutwiler in July 1979, one month before she graduated Troy University with her master's degree in counseling. She worked as an institutional recreation director, then as a training supervisor and later as a correctional officer supervisor.

From 1987 to 1998, Deese was a commander, captain and a training specialist at a corrections academy. She was promoted to deputy warden at Tutwiler in 1997 and took over the top job in 2000.

Deese compared being a warden to being the "mayor of a city."

"You're the administrator, the peace keeper, you do it all," she said.

The inmate who sued in 2005 claimed Deese didn't do enough to prevent her sexual assault.

David Sims was hired as a guard by the ADOC in 1999 despite two DUIs and a harassment charge in his criminal record. Prior to the sexual assault case, he'd been given a warning after he brought a new makeup compact and a condom to work, court records show.

The inmate testified that, in 2002, Sims grabbed her crotch and, with a death threat, forced her to perform oral sex on him.

"I was too embarrassed to tell my mother and too scared to tell anyone in authority at the prison because I knew my throat could be slit or I could be poisoned and no one would protect me," the inmate testified in an affidavit.

Sims pleaded guilty in 2004 to sodomy and received a suspended sentence — no jail time — for the crime.

Deese told AL.com that she helped bring Sims to justice. She also disagreed with the Department of Justice's assessment of Tutwiler's "toxic sexualized environment."

"I don't think it was that toxic. It is not what it should have been," Deese said, explaining that she had too few staff members.

Frank Albright

A National Institute of Corrections report published on Nov. 1, 2012 was especially critical of Albright's leadership at Tutwiler.

Former Tutwiler Prison Warden Frank Albright

He tried to be a "champion for women's issues," the report said, but he lacked the resources to create change.

The employees and inmates were less kind in their assessment, according to the report: "They noted that the leadership was 'unprofessional,' and the style of leadership was best described as 'micromanagement.'"

Albright, who could not be reached by phone or at his house in Montgomery, started his career with the ADOC in 1979 as a correctional officer at Staton Correctional Center but left two and a half years later for a United Parcel Service job. But in his first month with UPS, Albright was fired for breaking a light on a truck, according to his state personnel file.

He returned to the ADOC, where he resumed his career as an officer, first at Kilby Correctional Center.

Albright was promoted to be Deese's deputy warden at Tutwiler in 2001. "All I can tell you is he worked for me, he did a good job," Deese said. "Every problem that arose, I would bring them to his attention and he would correct that. That's all I can say about that."

Prison psychologist Larry Wood, who worked at Tutwiler for two months in 2012, said Albright would work 14-hour days.

"He clearly saw it as his kingdom," Wood said. "That's the way he behaved. He was rude, he was insensitive, and he couldn't talk to people in a civil tone, even."

Albright was transferred to Kilby to become warden on the same day that the National Institute of Corrections published its report, which stated that Tutwiler's inmates were treated in a "repressive and despotic fashion."

In Albright's last five years on the job, 18 employee-on-inmate crimes involving 30 corrections employees at Tutwiler were referred to the local district attorney's office. Six guards were successfully prosecuted.

State Corrections Commissioner Kim Thomas told AL.com that Albright never violated the ADOC's rules and assisted investigators and "did some positive things" at Tutwiler. "Ultimately, not everybody is perfect, certainly I'm not perfect," Thomas said.

Asked what would happen to a principal of a school where several teachers were prosecuted for a sex crime, Thomas said, "Typically you don't see anything written about the principals being held responsible for it or the school board members being held responsible for it."

Karla Jones

Not long after Albright left Tutwiler, his longtime deputy there was promoted to be the warden at Easterling Correctional Facility.

Karla Jones

It marked a bright point in Jones' ADOC career, which had a rocky beginning. Records show that ADOC officials rejected Jones' first application in 1986 on the grounds of moral turpitude after she was arrested for bouncing a $3.80 check to the Piggly Wiggly.

But she was soon hired as a correctional officer and began climbing the ladder.

Records show Jones was suspended for three days in July 2002 while working as a correctional officer supervisor at the Birmingham Work Release Center. In that case, she reported that she couldn't find an ounce of marijuana and $100 that had been seized from an inmate. Her boss threatened to call in ADOC investigators to search for it. Jones called two days later and said she had forgotten that the marijuana and cash were in her desk drawer.

Jones was promoted to be Albright's deputy warden in 2007. She supervised 120 employees in Tutwiler's security division.

The Department of Justice's report singled out Jones and her attendance at National Institute of Corrections gender-responsive training session in 2010. But when federal inspectors returned in 2013, they found no evidence that the procedures had been put in place. "Had Tutwiler adopted these strategies, a number of the harms identified in our investigation could have been avoided," according to the report.

Jones declined to comment for this story.

Bobby Barrett

Under the cloud of a federal investigation, Barrett took the reins at Tutwiler in November 2012.

In early 2014, the Department of Justice singled out Tutwiler's leadership in announcing that the agency was expanding its probe. Albright, Jones, and Barrett cooperated with federal investigators, but the report noted that many of the inmate abuse issues occurred prior to Barrett's arrival at Tutwiler.

Barrett previously led Kilby Correctional Facility since June 2011.

He started working for ADOC in 1981 as a correctional officer and later worked throughout the state as a sergeant, lieutenant, captain and deputy warden.

Reached at Tutwiler, Barrett referred inquiries to the ADOC's spokeswoman.

"You see in the news, daily, the things they write about Tutwiler," Barrett said. "We're conscious and careful about what we tell people."